The Teahouse of the Maryland Moon

Q and A with Amy Gardner of Gardner Mohr Architetcts LLC
By Beth Herman


Revealed during demolition, a newspaper stuffed into the wall of a Bethesda craftsman style bungalow was dated 1928. In an effort to transform the aging home into a serene and gracious residence, Amy Gardner of Gardner Mohr Architects LLC heeded the homeowner’s mandate for an Asian modern teahouse style motif where interconnected rooms led to a special garden space. DCMud spoke with Gardner about the process.

DCMud: Tell us about the original house.

Gardner: This project was one in which the client wanted to rebuild their 1,350 s.f. bungalow— in a state of advanced disrepair. It had a first floor plan that was fairly typical for bungalows, and it had an attic that had kind of been converted into small bedrooms which actually added about another 1,000 s.f. onto the home for a total of approximately 2,300 s.f. The owners wanted to recreate the sense of bungalow, but also to reconnect to its Asian roots.


DCMud: Interesting. How many people would know the genesis of the bungalow style?

Gardner: It actually has several lineages, and some go back—even indirectly— to Asian influences. This client wanted a bungalow that most people would recognize as such on their street, but as you move from street to garden, make a transition toward something more modern and Asian-inspired.

DCMud: How did you strategize the renovation?

 Gardner: We completely rebuilt the second floor, and moreover, created an 18 X 30-foot addition on the back. The second floor of the house is the size of the original footprint plus the size of the addition. We did that because of the way we designed the roof—the roof ridge was raised only seven feet—which extends out onto the addition. Height restrictions in Montgomery County are a big deal. Traditional farmhouses in Japan are called Minkas, and the roof form of this project is kind of like the roof form of a Minka.

The only elements we kept were the first floor exterior walls, and the rooms just behind those walls, but completely rebuilt the rest. There’s more new construction here than there is renovation. But when you’re inside, it’s very hard to tell what’s new or old until you get to that back portion, though there is a very smooth transition from street to garden so you’re almost not aware of what happened until you get there. The client’s priorities included interconnected spaces and a room that allowed them to feel like they are part of the garden. The home was finished at 4,000 s.f.  

DCMud: Besides the master suite, what do you find upstairs?

Gardner: There’s a second floor room that has a set of doors that exit onto a balcony, and there’s a spiral stair, so you can come into the house from the garden side and it could become a mother-in-law suite. The only thing missing up there is a kitchenette which can be added. The angle upstairs comes from tucking the rooms up into the roof form, as the roof form goes from its ridge just about down to the level of the first floor. Consequently you get spaces that get the actual roof for a ceiling rather than a flat ceiling. This is not only common for bungalows, but also for some vernacular traditional Asian homes.

DCMud: The exposed collar ties up there almost look like part of the Asian design.

Gardner: The collar ties keep the roof members from pushing out on the walls of the house. In most houses, the roof is entirely above the second floor and you don’t see it, but in this house…the structure of the roof is actually part of the room. We wanted the effect that exposing the collar ties would provide. Above them, the space goes all the way up to the ridge with a window at the top which brings east light into the room. Skylights above the collar ties also make for very interesting light. 

DCMud: Any sustainable elements?

Gardner: Much of the wood in the house is reclaimed barn wood, including the floor. The beams are engineered lumber wrapped in the reclaimed barn wood. The wall of west-facing glass is high-performing double-glazed with a high solar heat gain coefficient. Right outside is the veranda which provides shade for this exposure. We couldn’t change the angle of the house but we could manage the way light came in. The roof is a simulated shingle by EcoStar made from recycled tires.

DCMud: Speaking of sustainable, what sustains you, living and working in the District?

Gardner: I really like Rock Creek Park, and one reason is because of the way it carves its way through the city. You can be in the middle of Rock Creek Park and not know you’re almost in downtown D.C. I love its impact on the city and I love being in it. From a design and engineering standpoint, some of the bridges in the park are spectacular. Whenever I drive somewhere and can go through Rock Creek, I do: It’s a magical thing to be in the park and then pop up in the city.

Just Stepped Out

By Beth Herman

When a recent story on staircases from around the world piqued the interest and curiosity of readers, DCMud decided to explore what the District’s own native sons and daughters of architecture and design could offer to the mix, with results that ran the gamut from edgy to resourceful to sublime.

Using materials such as painted steel with Douglas fir, or maple, chestnut and etched glass, area architects have climbed up and stepped out way ahead of the pack, melding the practical with the magical, taking the concept of a necessary staircase to a whole new level.

Cabin (John) in the sky

For Principal Bob Wilkoff of Archaeon, Inc. Architects, the expanse of the firm’s office building in Cabin John, Md. was limited due to a tight lot. A structure designed to preserve and accommodate an existing 60-foot tall Sycamore tree and restrictive front yard setback demanded a spiral stair, but as it was an office with considerable traffic, the architect made the staircase 7-feet, 6-inches in diameter for comfort. Shop painted steel construction with helix handrails provides contrast to the grid of 49 18-by-18-inch windows. Treads are ribbed industrial rubber flooring.

Turret trumps all

When expanding a 1940s Tudor structure for a family in NW D.C., Wilkoff created a 6-foot diameter steel spiral stair that descends from the second floor master bedroom suite to the first floor family room. Located behind glass French doors to mitigate sound, carpeted treads in a fully glazed turret complete the airborne design.

Soaring solarium

For Principal Amy Gardner of Gardner Mohr Architects LLC, a uniquely renovated 21-foot high 1969 solarium—part of a D.C. residence—called for a staircase redolent of light and lightness. “The idea for the stair was to make a simple sculptural zigzag shape that appears to float,” Gardner said, noting the area under the stair blends into the floor, helping it appear to do so. Maple treads and risers with polished edges, and especially a translucent etched glass and steel handrail with stainless steel glass clips, add an additional lofty quality to the design.

Stairway to heaven

When renovating a Potomac, Md. residence—essentially a retreat for its occupants—a wooden tower with meditation and massage rooms and a lower level gym were included. McInturff Architects featured a staircase that connects the home’s three levels made of painted steel and Douglas fir, with maple stair treads, backed with Galvalume sheet steel.

Halo Linea low-voltage track lighting is built into a slot in the steel structure of the stair.

Cold at the top

In purchasing and reimagining their own “profoundly mediocre” 1960s standard developer-type home in Winchester, Va., architects Chuck Swartz and Beth Reader of Reader & Swartz Architects concede their staircase is the “most curious” on which they’ve ever worked.

“You can stand on top of the refrigerator that way, which seems like a ridiculous thing to do, except there are books up there,” Swartz said.

Addressing a technical problem with brick veneer on the sides of the building that just stopped at one point, the two gable ends were skeletonized so that they were just studs. Two-by-fours running horizontally were located every four feet, with structural insulated panels on the outside of the building. “We then over-windowed it,” Swartz said.

Left with a skeleton inside on the gable ends, shelves were created off of two-by-two’s that ran horizontally so the gable ends became large libraries. The end without the staircase is served by a rolling ladder from an old telephone building, as Swartz’s father worked for the telephone company.

At the other end, a very large refrigerator was obtained as Swartz loves to cook, encased in a birch veneer red-stained plywood box. An alternating tread staircase was positioned on the side of it, allowing the occupants to walk up and climb on top of the refrigerator to access all the books.

Additionally, the staircase becomes a kind of a sculpture in and of itself, featuring alternating treads and maple shelves as they ascend, held together by red oak that’s stained black. It also acts as a graduated display for art, artifacts and family objects.

A place for us

In Frederick County, Va., another singular Reader & Swartz staircase has several things going for it, among them bleachers made out of chestnut, which is the same as the floor, and which go up to the landing. “They stop so the children in the household can play or you can display things on them,” Swartz explained.

In addition, every other tread—the treads that are not the bleachers—are little maple rafts that sit on them and look like small crates. Once you get to the landing, the part that gets you all the way to the second floor is steel and open treads of the same maple. “It’s a way to think of a staircase as a little stage or amphitheater, or a place to sit and think about whether some of the pieces of the staircase can be different than others and still meet the building code,” Swartz quipped.

Some photos courtesy of Anice Hoachlander and Ron Blunt. 

The Story of Light and Wind

By Beth Herman

For one homeowner in northwest D.C., long since moved away, the addition of a 1969 solarium to a 1929 residence meant capturing the sun in a light-filled space. But based on construction standards of the day, the structure was not without serious problems that included sweeping temperature variances. Cold in the winter and hot in the summer, untempered, single pane glazing further aided and abetted the building’s botherations. And because key energy and safety issues plagued the cavernous space, its use was limited for the current homeowners who relished observing the weather and the great outdoors.

With a configuration of an up-and-down space that had actually involved two additions, joined by a stairway, the larger space was 20-by-12 feet and the long, thin L-shaped space was slightly smaller. “When you went from the house into the larger space, you very much felt like you’d walked into a garden or greenhouse,” said Principal Amy Gardner of Gardner Mohr Architects, noting among the goals was to extend that feeling into the L-shaped space as well.

Lighting the way

In addition to addressing these intrinsic issues, and in a modern application of elements, Gardner used both natural and electric light as art in an unusual design challenge to recast the space. “They were really focused on what we could do with lighting,” Gardner said, noting lighting design specialist John Coventry was retained for the job.

At the same time, the homeowners did not want the solarium’s mid-century quality entirely subjugated to 21^st Century design dictums. “They wanted to bring it up in time, but keep what was really timeless about it,” Gardner explained, adding still another facet of the redesign was not to make it so au courant that one might look back in a few years and know exactly when it was renovated.

Twenty-one feet at its apogee, the solarium created what Gardner called “an acoustically spectacular space” for the homeowners who appreciate music, and an opportunity to strategically employ skylights, transparent and translucent glass in realizing the design. To that end, glass wall panels, doors and windows were placed where the homeowners knew the sun rose and set, marking the passage of light in each day and each season. Because of the orientation of each addition, and despite a dominant north face, multiple skylights were employed to capture even the south light, Gardner explained, to bounce off various surfaces and reflect down into the space. “In a sense light became the art in the room,” she said.

Desiring a pristine ceiling plane, thereby eschewing traditional recessed lighting, ample ambient and task lighting was achieved and textured in part by placement of a translucent shoji-like screen panel, lit from the base by concealed LED lights. In the evening the panel glows from the inside out, and pivotal exterior lights in turn focus lighting from the other side. Pieces from an art collection are illuminated by spots and a smattering of track lights that, according to the architect, “…became a kind of jewelry in the space.” In essence, and especially referencing the screen panel, surfaces themselves became light fixtures, Gardner said.

Warmth, weather and wood

Where heating and cooling were concerned, over nearly four decades insulation had become compacted and inadequate, needing to be replaced. With an improved envelope, and though there is auxiliary heat and air conditioning, a radiant floor was selected for comfort and efficiency, and to mitigate the effects of considerable glazing.

Because the homeowners like to experience weather, skylights are operable providing for natural ventilation when utilized. Doors and windows were strategically located for ideal cross-ventilation and to court the natural convection of the space where air moves from high to low, or low to high, depending on seasonal temperatures. “We tried to make use of as many passive strategies as we could implement for light and ventilation,” Gardner said.

Wood used in the redesign is rapidly renewable eucalyptus, and the indoor/outdoor flooring is a charcoal-colored brick paver. A simulated slate sloping roof on one section is by EcoStar, which is recycled material, with a thermoplastic polyolethin (TPO) roofing membrane on the structure’s flat roof aspect.

As the space was technically considered an alteration rather than a formal addition, the architects were not tasked with bringing it up to code. Nevertheless they did so, accomplishing it by improving the building envelope with more efficient materials, elements, strategies and systems within the late 1960s infrastructure—and in fact exceeding current energy efficiency code requirements by 28 percent. “We did this without substantive modification of the envelope itself,” Gardner affirmed, noting wall and roof cavities were not increased, nor was the floor structure modified.

“Working with what was there was really important,” Gardner said of the distinguished ‘60s solarium, “but we were also driven by the goals of capturing light and wind.”

Photos courtesy of Boris Suvak

To Raze or Not To Raze

By Beth Herman In the film "Prizzi's Honor," Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner played hitmen (or hitpeople, to be politically correct) assigned, in parlance, to rub each other out. When Nicholson fell in love with his nemesis, he had a rather pivotal conversation with himself, ruminating, "Do I ice her; do I marry her? Do I ice her; do I marry her?"

When the time comes to decide whether to raze or preserve a cherished property, there are factors, like those in Nicholson's dilemma, that run the gamut from practical to emotional - and everything in between.

According to Amy Gardner of Bethesda, Maryland's Gardner Mohr Architects LLC, we live in different houses now. “People are living in housing stock which, whether from the turn-of-the-(last) century, pre-war, post war, 1950s or ‘60s – anything up to the ‘80s, doesn’t fit their lifestyles.” What’s more, they are “energy hogs,” Gardner observed, noting increasingly clients are approaching the firm with critical questions about saving or demolishing outmoded family homes.

Lowering the Boom

In the so-called boom years, Gardner recalled, about a 15-year period from the early 1990s into the first part of this decade, it was very common to see an older home in the greater D.C. metropolitan area destroyed, often by a builder to start a custom home on the order of 5,000-7,000 s.f., depending on site and zoning. Today, Gardner said, and even with problematical older homes, “We have a lot of clients come to us and say, ‘I love my neighborhood, the schools; I really don’t want to move. We’ve been looking at houses to buy and we’re not finding any place that’s better than what we have, and want to look at options to renovate and meet our family’s needs.’”

Aside from aesthetics which may involve poor configuration of space, and citing issues that may include antiquated mechanical systems, rotted siding, inadequate wiring (more common in turn-of-the-century homes), poor insulation, deteriorating roofs, movement around window openings, inferior HVAC systems and/or any combination of the aforementioned elements, which is often the case, Gardner said the decision to renovate vs. tear down and start over on the same lot is often painstaking – and highly expensive. “We can be talking hundreds of thousands of dollars,” she affirmed, maybe even something close to the cost of purchasing a new home. But, there are also different levels of renovation.

“Homeowners generally have to think about their long term goals when doing a thoroughgoing renovation,” Gardner explained, with “thoroughgoing” meaning the existing fabric of the house is maintained. “The money in – where the homeowner may not be able to get that money back out for quite some time, like if they were to turn around and want to sell that house – those values plus the renovation values are high enough that they really wouldn’t be able to sell right away.”

Gardner also indicated that in the firm’s purview, and considering sustainability factors which are naturally key in building issues today, “the most efficient use of materials are the ones you don’t throw out.” To that end, the architect believes in identifying the characteristics, qualities and strengths of the structure’s existing elements, keeping them and building on them to create something more attuned to contemporary sensibilities.

What’s Old Can Be New Again

Conceding that sometimes, especially at the outset of a project, the decision to save a house is something she considers an act of faith, Gardner, who is also a faculty member at the University of Maryland School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, explained that preserving can have different facets. “Preserving can mean anything from saving the foundations of the foundation wall and building from there, or all the way to preserving a house largely intact and doing a kind of interior renovation, to preserving the house intact and doing a complete gut of it with an addition, along with providing all new building systems and finishes,” she said. In the last iteration, you essentially get a whole new house without having completely torn down the one that was there.

Noting that the firm starts every project in this vein with an energy audit in order to understand the performance of the house and its systems, Gardner said at times she and her partner utilize the services of a structural engineer as well. The structure itself, a barometer of other failures (a cracking foundation wall could indicate possible water infiltration), is a good prognosticator of time and cost. That said, and even with the proverbial roof falling in, mitigating circumstances such as one that arose with a Gardner Mohr client a few years back involved a 1920s era bungalow, about which Gardner said “a sanity check would have indicated the house be torn down.” The foundation, however, was discovered to be comprised of 20-inch thick granite walls, and demolition alone would have been exceedingly difficult. “That was the tipping point for the decision-making process about preserving that house,” Gardner affirmed.

Also identifying current lot and zoning issues as major factors in the decision to retain and renovate, Gardner said because zoning laws are not static, on occasion people tear down and try to fill out the zoning envelope by building something as large as they can, which makes for an odd and cumbersome proportion between the house and the site. In the example of a current client in Bethesda undergoing renovation of a mid-century home they’d considered razing, Gardner said because of zoning, if they tore down the home, they could not rebuild with the same north/south orientation that has served the homeowners well. “While that may not sound like a big deal,” she explained, “right now it’s ideal for passive energy strategies, and they would lose that advantage.”

The Greening of the Girders

If one does decide to let go of a house and desires to do so within sustainable parameters, deconstruction is a green-friendly alternative to demolition, where depending on the deconstruction category, reusable and code-abiding materials from the building such as flooring, lighting fixtures, paneling, plumbing, bricks and lumber are stripped and can be donated to charity, precipitating a tax write-off.

“We believe in saving what we can save,” Gardner said about renovating vs. razing. “We believe in the fabric of the neighborhood and trying to preserve that, and, overall, I think there’s a kind of cultural value in trying to preserve these places.”

Photography by Celia Pearson